Recently, along with the widespread proliferation of smartphones, users' desires to receive support of high-quality data services anywhere at any time are increasing tremendously. Thus, there is a need for a technology for providing a high data rate for the terminals at the boundaries of cells as well as at centers thereof.
Although it is possible to increase a data transfer rate by supporting an additional antenna port for each cell at the center of the cell, it is difficult to increase the data transfer rate over a limit at the boundary of the cell without inter-cell cooperation because the terminals at the boundary of the cell are significantly affected by interference from neighboring cells.
In addition, in order to enable a high-rate data service even at a region in which there are many users, frequency reuse technology using a small cell, such as a picocell or femtocell, in an area covered by a macrocell is being widely used, thereby further increasing a need for a technology for efficiently controlling interference between transmission points.
The technology for efficiently controlling interference between transmission points is a major issue in this field. In particular, the technology is called coordinated multipoint (CoMP) by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and has been selected as a research item for Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) Release 11.
Accordingly, there is a great need to develop technologies for mitigating the inter-cell interference, increasing transfer efficiency, and evaluating their performances through CoMP technology.